Stop Funding the Frontier
Intelligent Model Routing. Real-World Validation. Frontier-Class Margins.
Your AI bill keeps climbing and you cannot prove a cheaper model keeps up. Build the trace logger, the eval harness, the router, and the one-page swap you can defend. Measured on your own work, not a vendor's benchmark.
Every “cut your AI costs” book measures its own system, not yours. This one hands you the measurement: a trace logger, an evaluation harness, a ranked shortlist scored on your tasks, and a router that sends each job to the cheapest model that still wins. 242 pages of runnable code, from first trace to defended swap.
The trace logger, eval harness, router, and analysis tools all ship as a free companion repo, organized by the chapter that builds each file. It runs the moment you clone. No key, nothing to install.
What You'll Build
The frontier tax: money you hand the most expensive model for work it never needed to do.
Break your own bill into four line items. Thinking tokens bill at the output rate.
The only two units that matter: cost per finished task and the quality delta.
Forty minutes wrapping your client in a logger that records real cost with a task tag.
Replay your own traces on a cheaper model and score exactly what changed.
Ollama, vLLM, OpenRouter, LiteLLM, open-weight hosted. Three candidates behind one interface.
A lookup, not an oracle. Route the easy work cheap, keep the hard work on the frontier.
A tiered agent where the frontier plans and verifies while cheap models do the work.
Put every token-savings trick through a scorer. Keep what survives, bin the rest.
The one page that ends the argument. Subscription or API, settled in your own numbers.
The keep-list and the guardrail that catches a cheap model failing before your users do.
One command, a fresh recommendation. The monthly re-measure that survives the next price change.